c’mon! this one’s kind of distinct, no? granted it’s repetitive… but i did try to strum a rhythm to it…. ok, i know. i suck. i think your best bet to guessing it may be in the beginning before i get too off beat. once i get into the middle, it starts to get more and more off beat.

I completed 30 of the tasks with a few of them in progress.

Completed:
9.27.08 - 19. Learn how to cook something fancy
11.24.07 - 76. Meet a celebrity
11.9.07 - 53. See a Broadway show
10.25.07 - 68. Put up tacky Christmas lights
9.3.07 - 43. Go fishing/crabbing
7.23.07 - 42. Go camping, campfire smores and all
7.4.07 - 47. Light fireworks
6.13.07 - 61. Buy a real CD album instead of downloading it
6.11.07 - 85. Eat only fish and vegetables for a week
5.5.07 - 55. Attend a concert
4.15.07 - 24. Learn how to really bowl (get a score above 130)
3.31.07 - 100. Spend a day at Gravelly Point watching airplanes take off from Reagan National
3.31.07 - 28. Swim at least three times a month
2.28.07 - 66. Buy a “slacker”-like Demotivators poster and hang it at work
2.25.07 - 48. Build a snowman 5′5″ or taller
1.12.07 - 57. Watch a scary movie
11.1.06 - 87. Become a “food snob” - try out new unique/non-chain restaurants
10.14.06 - 35. Visit a corn maze
9.12.06 - 98. Go see an eye doctor
8.17.06 - 83. Wine taste
7.27.06 - 65. Write letters petitioning Warner Brothers to release Animaniacs to DVD and if/when it does come out, buy it
7.26.06 - 62. Buy stock in some company
5.29.06 - 99. Spend a day at a park playing
5.10.06 - 96. Go see a doctor
3.31.06 - 2. Wake up before 8am every day for a week
2.24.06 - 69. Have the guts to a quit a job
2.10.06 - 1. Wake up early and see a sunrise
2.8.06 - 78. Stop drinking soda for a month
1.25.06 - 97. Go see a dentist
1.15.06 - 64. Subscribe to a magazine
1.11.06 - 82. Eat breakfast every morning for a week

In Progress:
7. Visit (not drive through) more than half of the states
11. Learn how to play recognizable songs on the guitar
63. Start a jar of coins and collect $100
88. Attend 10 weddings
90. Be a bridesmaid at a wedding (actually completed after the date)

Never Even Had a Chance:
4. Visit an European country
5. Visit a South American country
6. Visit an African country
15. Film my own “claymation” movie, a la Wallace and Gromit
37. Read The Lord of the Rings books
70. Find a job I enjoy. no, love
93. Go a day without saying/IMing “bah”
94. Go a day without saying/IMing “niiice”
95. Go a day without saying/IMing “dude”

i think i’m going to extend my 1001 day project til the end of 2008 to try to knock out some more. 2 more months! ok… my next post is going to be a name the tune! help me out on #11… guess!!

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/23/1746254

“Developers seeking job security in the years ahead could find an unlikely edge in Cobol. According to an InfoWorld report, demand for Cobol skills is surging, with salaries on the rise. More importantly, the short supply of offshore Cobol programmers and the fact that mainframes aren’t going away anytime soon are spurring longevity for big-iron skills, with many companies looking to hire in-house Cobol pros to bridge mainframe Cobol apps to the rest of the enterprise. The report provides further evidence that Cobol may indeed be primed for a comeback, with new kinds of Cobol integration jobs emerging to prove old-guard skills are critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today.”

dude! my time at CGI was not a complete waste! i wonder if the SilkTest job market is better or worse than the COBOL job market. maybe it’s time to switch back to the other useless skill i’ve acquired in my 4 years of working…

background: i have no boobs. well, i guess i have boobs, but they are tiny boobs and in combination with my potbelly… i’m pretty much flat. actually, maybe my potbelly stands out more than my boobs. i’m painting a great picture aren’t i? anyways… for vicky’s wedding, i have to wear a halter dress with a strapless bra. i don’t have a good strapless bra and as already stated, i have no boobs. when i went home last weekend, my mom saw the stick-on-boobs bra i usually wear when i have to wear a strapless bra and was like that is too flat!! she lent me her strapless bra which i put on over the stick-on-boob bra which made it better! so the lesson here is… wear multiple bras! anyways, so i had to go shopping for some boobs.

i went to victoria’s secret on sunday. i was very nervous because those salespeople are so goshdarn helpful. too helpful! one person offered to measure me. no thanks!!! after i took a few bras to the fitting room to try on, one lady kept knocking on the door asking me if i needed help. seriously! like twice before i even tried on the first bra! she knocked like 5 times. and then, after i had tried on all the bras, i decided i needed to get another size. i wanted to just get it myself so i put on all my clothes again and opened the door and there was a lady standing RIGHT by my door! so then i was like ok… i need a different size. so she got it for me. and then stood like IN the doorway! and was like why don’t you try it on and i can tell you if it fits? uhhhhhhh and then she just stood there…. with the door half ajar!! it was very very awkward…

i’m frustrated when i waste 3 hours trying to figure out why code works in one scenario but the SAME CODE does not work a second later. it’s not like the page navigated away or anything. you are sitting at the same, EXACT page but just loaded a dynamic context menu. THEN i found out it’s because the fucking application that i use STOPPED PUTTING IN SPACES the second time it read THE SAME PAGE. WHY!?

i’m frustrated because it seems the only challenges at my job is to be able to produce multiple copies (with minor changes) of the same code at a fast rate and to code around the bugs in the application we are end users for. it gets boring and frustrating rather quickly.

but i did it again between tutoring in the city, tutoring in the suburbs, small group, and various leagues for sports i do not play… my mondays through thursdays of every week are pretty much set… and weekends too. and it’s already started… starting from the last week of august, i haven’t been home that often again! so i had to postpone visiting pittsburgh and cincinnati until at least december. and i’ve resorted to scheduling to hang out with ann. i’m scheduled to hang out with ann on october 23 and i seriously couldn’t find any other time that’ll work!!

i’m so stupid.

• the friend who i was staying with had been asking all week for my flight information but i’d been really busy at work so kept putting it off. finally, late thursday afternoon, right before leaving the office, i decided to online check-in. for some strange reason, my confirmation number does not work. that’s when i noticed…. my flight was for THAT morning. i had booked for the wrong day! BAH!!! i couldn’t believe how stupid i was, but on the same side, i was surprised that it hadn’t happened to be before considering how disorganized i am.
• so i had to drive to BWI and get a standby voucher. this allowed me to keep my original ticket and not have to pay again. had i not realized my mistake until friday morning, my ticket would’ve already been processed and i would be out of luck. thank you american airline! your customer support people really helped me!
• so after driving to BWI and back, it was already past 9pm. i fretted about how to pack when flying standby… can you check in baggage? how do they know whether to put it on the flight if you’re not certain to be on the flight?! i bugged a bunch of different people and got all sorts of different responses and then finally called american airlines again to confirm what would happen. oh, and also because i realized i had a connecting flight that i also needed to be on standby for. (american was on it… i was already on the standby list for both flights!) after i packed, i slept for about 2 hours and then went to may’s place because she’d offered to drive me to the airport at the buttcrack of the morning (thanks!). when i called her, she was surprisingly awake for the hour! (important later!!) i drove to the airport and then gave her my car (because she’d drive it down to dulles when she flew out).
• luckily, i got standby seats on both flights. so at the airport gate, i remembered i had to text my friend to let her know i got on the flight. so i got my cell phone out to text her… aaaaaaand then i realized i left my cell phone in my car from when i called may!! so i don’t have many phone numbers memorized (luckily i have some! because i went through a stretch of like 6 months where my cell phone screen was cracked so i had to dial by memory) so i didn’t know may’s number and i wasn’t sure that she was still in my car (and had noticed the cell phone in there) so i was trying to remember someone else who knew may who could call her. but who’d be awake at like 5am! finally, i decided to call tina because she mentioned she would be in CA by the time i arrived… so i figured she’d either be at the airport like me orrrrr she’d already be there and it’d be 2am and she might be awake hanging out or something. so i used my credit card to use a pay phone to call her LONG DISTANCE… only to have her hang up on me. hang up! worse than just letting it go to voicemail! jerk. FINALLY, i got online through my work laptop’s iConnect that lets me piggyback off other people’s pay-to-use wifi and i sent may an email asking her to bring my cell phone (and i got a few phone numbers written down)
• when i landed in san jose, i had to get back online to ask my friend if she was done with work (she would be by the time i arrived in SF). i also emailed to let tina and people in san jose know that i wouldn’t be able to hang out with them in san jose since i was without cell phone. apparently, one of them called the airport to page me…. but i was so out of it, i didn’t even hear… so i drove to SF with no problems and parked my car right on the same block as my friend. i darted inside to drop off my stuff and then we went to go eat. because it was noon… which was 3pm my time and i’d been awake for 12 hours without food!!! … and that’s when we saw the parking ticket. in the ~20 minutes i was in her apartment… i got a parking ticket for not curbing my tires! bah!!! because she lives on one of the hills in SF… i didn’t even remember all those rules from driving school! BOOO

the rest of the trip was less eventfilled. the wedding was nice, i ate lots of good food, i got a nice tour of all the little streets of SF. very fun trip. just a very stressful start.

a couple of weeks ago, i went home and “little mei” wasn’t upstairs watching tv with “little jie”. what the heck right??? when i went into the basement, i saw “little mei” facedown on one of the chairs. i started to complain to my mom, asking why “little mei” was in the basement?! and then she told me to look at the dog.

do you notice anything special about her?

for comparison… the original whiffer

SHE’S GOT EYEBROWS!!! my mom sewed some on for her! so for the longest time, my mom kept the tag on “little mei” and i kept telling her if she wasn’t happy with her, she should return her. my mom claimed “little mei” was fine, she just looked a little weird. about a month ago, she triumphantly proclaimed she had figured out why “little mei” looked a little off… she had no eye brows! so she said she’d sew some on. i just didn’t think she really would….

here’s another picture of “little mei” and “little jie”… they’re sitting in a flower pot my mom was going to donate to her church. but i came home one weekend and put the two stuffed animals in it and now my mom’s thinking of donating a different flower pot to the church. hehe, my parents put the flower pot on the divider (between the family room and kitchen) so that they watch whenever my parents are watching TV or eating dinner.